Aiden Pearce is the Worst

I never finished the game Shadow Complex. The gameplay was fine, level design fine, but I hit a point where I just couldn’t put up with Jason Flemming anymore. I remember clearly exactly why I put the game down: one of the nameless faceless soldiers yelled something like “Who is this guy? Is it just one man?!” And I thought… yeah, he really is just one man, and, in fact, not a particularly interesting or special man. Not Batman or Samus Aran or Solid Snake or even Sam Fischer or someone actually cool. He’s just this dude Jason, and he frankly bores me to tears with his white-boy blandness. The most interesting thing Jason Flemming ever did is in the alternate ending, where he just gives up and goes home. As far as I am concerned, this is the canon ending to Shadow Complex, the only ending that makes sense. As a bonus getting this ending means spending way less time with Jason.

Unfortunately Jason’s crown has been stolen. I have a new least favorite. Aiden Pearce is just the worst.

Aiden Pearce is the protagonist of Watch Dogs. Watch Dogs itself isn’t terrible. Some parts are clever, maybe even fun. But Watch Dogs is a serious game about a serious man, so joy is not permitted. To support this mandated joylessness, it weighs the entire affair down with its protagonist. I hate everything about Aiden Pearce.

I hate his douchey name. I hate his hoarse put on “tough-guy” voice. I hate his outfit, with the like-six layered shirts. But mostly I hate how he’s never owning up the awful stuff he’s doing, or at least admitting the possibility of having fun doing it.

Let’s get this out of the way: I realize that most video game protagonists are sociopaths. The minute controller meets hand, the fictional protagonist’s humanity drains away in the name of creating a fun sandbox for the non-fictional player. The Khajiit I spent the most time with during my stay in Skyrim was absolutely a sociopath. Heck, look at what they’ve done to Luigi lately.

A Skyrim character is a blank slate; no action makes less sense than any other action, which makes the game’s narrative uneven, but not broken. It’s choose-your-own-sociopath. However, if a game has a specific protagonist in a sandbox environment, especially a destructible one with cars and guns, they have a challenge ahead of them to justify the player’s behavior. There’s two basic ways to handle this in a game narrative, both of which involve some actual writing skill. The game can ignore it, the way Uncharted does, and cast the character as an everyman in spite of his mounting kill count. This causes ludonarrative dissonance but is otherwise meaningless in the course of things, and will make the story work anyway. Another thing the game can do is just own the madness, Saints Row the Third or Prototype style, and confess the character is a bit of a monster. According to all reports, the best part of Grand Theft Auto V is that it finally tried this, creating in Trevor a character who finally seems to be the right guy to enact all the crazy mayhem the player was going to do anyway.

Watch Dogs takes the middle road, which doesn’t work. It acknowledges all of Pearce’s horribleness, but then tries to justify the things he does with the narrative it builds up about his vigilante activities. Conveniently and lazily, that narrative mostly involves slamming women into refrigerators. Bad things just keep happening around Aiden! Poor baby. Just gonna have to get some bigger guns and mow down another dozen men.

What kicks off the narrative of Watch Dogs? Aiden’s niece is dead, killed by a hitman who was targeting Pearce to, supposedly, scare him. Telling: when he was driving his niece around on their final fateful day together, he says they weren’t even going anywhere in particular. For him to have had a place to go, he might have needed some kind of hobby. Or maybe the niece would have to be something other than a token, who also had a place to go? Ha ha, sure, that’s a pretty thought.

It’s trivial to steal everyone’s money in the game, so you, the player, are going to do this, probably even if the person you’re stealing from is labeled a poor retiree and you’re picking out their last pension. Maybe you find this satisfying: too bad Aiden doesn’t. Stealing cars? Doing sweet takedowns? Nothing entertains this man. This would be okay if he had some other motivation, even something like a solider’s duty or a love for humanity driving him forward, but he does not appear to. Instead, there is grim revenge.

It looks like fun but I assure you Aiden is NOT enjoying this

To emphasize this, Aiden has a “conspiracy wall” in his hideout where he has noted all the evidence he has about who tracked down his niece. Check it: the conspiracy wall has the look of cut-out photographs and clippings pasted onto a map, but it’s a digital projection. So Aiden Pearce, instead of just push-pinning newspaper clippings onto the wall and drawing with chalk like a proper conspiracy hobo, painstakingly assembled his conspiracy evidence in… Photoshop? doing little paper tear effects? and then set up a projector system just to project that file onto the wall.

What an asshole.

Aiden Pearce is on his phone, like, all the time, even when he’s in the presence of people he’s supposed to care about, like his sister. I know we all do this sometimes. But, geez, look her in the eye why don’t you?

I haven’t yet played a lot of Watch Dogs. Mostly, I’ve experienced the game vicariously through my husband, who bought it for himself. I watched but did not participate in this portion of the game, which is at the maybe two-thirds mark, and which I will now very slightly spoil: the sex auction sequence. In order to get through this mission in the game, Pearce has to go to an auction, which, as it turns out, is for sex trafficking. To get in, Aiden decides the easiest way would be to pretend to be someone else who is already scheduled to be there. Aiden phones in to his handler looking for an identity he can reasonably assume, gets one, and says in so many words, “well, I guess I have to kill this guy, then.” He says this on scant details, sight unseen. He could feasibly just knock the guy out and lock him up for a few hours, but no, death it is. It turns out the other guy is a monster, but that’s just convenient, a way of post-hoc adding “yes this attitude was totally justified” to Pearce’s offhand murder.

Aiden calls himself “The Vigilante,’ but he isn’t a superhero. He’s just… some guy… and we don’t really even know much about his past, other than the time that little girl died, and his previous history of black-hat hacking. He doesn’t seem to like anything, or even hate anything. He murders grimly and in great numbers because murdering must be done. I do not like him much, except when I see things that pick fun of him.

Even just a few hours in the game, I heard a thug say something to this effect. “Who is this guy?! Is he just one man?”

Dear All Video Games: that line alone does not make a character a badass. Please, please stop.

In order to get another perspective on this, I enlisted my husband, the person for whom this game was made. As he spent a lot more time with Aiden than I did, I wanted to get his take, and he wanted to share it. Beneath this jump, a short guest essay from my husband Ryan. This contains a lot more spoilers for specific moments in the game.

Husband Commentary

I played Watchdogs all the way through. I cheev hunted a bit so I did all of the out-of-the-box sidequests, collected all the stuff I could, etc. I squeeze every bit of content out of video games I buy because I do it relatively rarely. Here is my reflection on the experience.

Watchdogs is a fun game. It was designed for 14-year-old me who devoured dystopian cyberpunk fiction with zeal. 20 years later, I felt obligated to buy the game my past self wanted. Fortunately, Watch Dogs is a polished experience with interesting mechanics. The game-ness of Watch Dogs is great, and the difficulty curve is forgiving once you get the hang of the basic systems. Hacking through extensive security is a Pipe Dreams minigame, but most of the time you can just take over cameras or mess with traffic lights without having to do anything more than push a button. Skilling up lets you mangle the environment even more, which is essential in late game action.

Ryan wanted me to include this picture as an illustration to represent his 14-year-old self. (AJ)

I agree with Amanda that Aiden is awful. 14-year-old me would write this character unapologetically, but 20 years of these kinds of protagonists has taken its toll on me. I had no sense that Aiden had any particular call to justice when I first picked up a controller. Vengeance, sure. You pick up Aiden and he’s beating the tar out of Maurice, the hitman who caused the fateful car wreck that ended with Aiden’s niece Lena dead. That’s about all we know when Aiden uses Maurice as a basic combat tutorial. Aiden has already beaten Maurice all to hell when you get control, and the poor dumb thug stays pathetic during your interactions with him later. Instead of vigilante justice, I felt like I was playing a super-criminal retaliating against a rival. OK, cool. That’s something I can get behind.

I decided to start running up the score once I got out of the opening mission. I began walking the streets hunting for people to rob. To do so, I had to keep the “Profiler” open to track down people with active bank accounts I could hit. Beyond telling you if they have something to steal, the Profiler reduces humans to about an index card of bullet points. You always get their name and their yearly income, but sometimes you’ll get other things.

Game journos have spilled ink talking about people using the Profiler to kill various types of people. The only thing I was looking for as I was using the Profiler was whether I could suck money out of somebody’s phone and put it into my pocket. It didn’t matter if somebody had recently adopted a child or were recently talking to a criminal. Everyone was equal as a source of revenue. I stole from the poor. I stole from the rich. I stole from everybody. Why not? It was a pickup without any consequence, so I did it constantly. Mr. Big Time Vigilante never flinched no matter how long I kept it up.

I spent an entire day hunting for big paydays. When I bought the skill that made the high-value targets highlight on my Profiler in blue, I could even more cavalierly tear around and cherry-pick people out of crowds. I eagerly ran up the score to a million dollars, expecting a cheev. When one didn’t come, I built my way up to 2 mil before I got bored, but by then I had more money than I’d ever need. Unlike in real life, money in Watch Dogs doesn’t do a lot for you (at least not in my stealth-heavy play style). But hey, I was a multimillionaire. Life was good except for what’s-her-name being dead and all.

I glutted myself like the NSA by tapping into phones to eavesdrop on conversations to break up the tedium of hunting dollars. Why wouldn’t Aiden randomly invade your privacy just because he could? There’s even a whole category of sidequest missions where you break into people’s networks and stare at them through their webcams. Those were among the first sidequests I did. Aiden clearly doesn’t care as he never remarks about any of your acts, no matter how heinous.

Aiden does remark on how much ctOS collects on people if you snoop around during the ctOS tower missions. What little he says then is mostly to ask himself what they might be doing with it all. If you follow enough leads, you eventually figure out that ctOS influences events in subtle ways for unknown ends. Aiden doesn’t care, focused entirely on his own problems. If Ubisoft depicted Aiden as selfish or at least disinterested in other humans, that might be a motivation for his assorted antisocial behaviors. Instead, like Cloud in FF7, extrinsic motivations (someone telling him to do this or that) direct Aiden through main quest rather than intrinsic motivations (get a hobby or something, dude).

While Aiden isn’t much of a character, he succeeds wildly as an avatar of hacker wish-fulfillment power. He can do anything he wants and does. I went off and did sidequests after unlocking my entire skill tree. During the side missions, it’s easy to forget that Aiden is motivated by revenge at all. Aiden’s quest for revenge doesn’t affect anything but main quest. Aiden fights crime during many of the sidequests, but it’s not clear why outside of hammering people who come into his hustle. Even when Aiden gets involved tracking down a serial killer or breaking up a human trafficking ring, there’s never any overarching ethos to it outside of the promise of hitting a guy. (He does seem to like hitting guys.)

Perhaps anticipating these complaints, the game attempts to stuff vigilante action down your throat. One of the things that made my side questing enjoyable was listening to my tunes on my phone while driving around looting and pillaging. When the ctOS detected a crime about to happen nearby, it would cut my music. I had to either leave the area to get my tunes back or resolve the crime. Often times I would be looking for a collectable, so I’d divert from my current task to deal with this interruption to my jams. This would mean stalking a guy, waiting for the ‘go’ signal, and then running at him to take him down. Taking down criminals gave me more XP, so this was important early game to get more hack power.

Later on, staying nonlethal(ish) helped repair my reputation after a main quest mission would get me into a situation where I’d crash through a crowd of civilians in a truck or misthrow a grenade. As I had developed a healthy fear of the police from their efficient ass-kickings in early game, keeping the city on my side by hitting poor people with batons became a priority. The love of the citizens became a source of perverse pride for me as the game continued. While I’d stolen a couple million from Chicago citizens, eavesdropped on their conversations and blown up city infrastructure while fighting my rivals, they loved me anyway.

My crime fighting sometimes didn’t go smoothly. Occasionally criminals would try to call reinforcements or start shooting back at Aiden, which necessitated Aiden blowing up transformers on them for instant death. Despite the fact that I was usually breaking up street muggings or domestic violence, I’d go lethal if it looked like the situation was going to turn into a pain in the ass. Let this be a lesson to criminals everywhere: Interrupting “One Mic” can be a death sentence in Aiden Pearce’s world.

Eventually I ran out of things to grab, so I had to stop listening to music and advance the plot. Damien, Aiden’s ex-partner, generates many of the emotional beats of main quest. (Subtle.) After Aiden refuses to help Damien solve the mystery of why the Merlot job went bad (the event that incited someone to hire a hitman to kill Aiden, ending in what’s-her-face’s death, etc.), Damien kidnaps Aiden’s sister Nicole to make him cooperate. During the middle of the period where Damien has Nicole in custody, the heat mostly evaporates in favor of a vague sense of menace along with bantering between all three characters.

Part of me hoped for a reconciliation — Damien’s no worse than you and you seem to have similar goals — but the tone of the game wouldn’t allow for it. Eventually Aiden gets his sister back by guile, prompting Damien to kill another woman you care about in a turn of events that surprises nobody. Naturally, you have to deal with it (with a brief interlude where you hunt down and kill Deadmaus for ruining house music^W^W^W^W^WDefalt, another enemy hacker). You know how this ends from there.

As a game, Watch Dogs is fun and is worth a play. As a story, Watch Dogs’ revenge-flavored narrative doesn’t have much meat to it. If the game had pitched Aiden as a super-criminal watching out for his own with his awesome power, it probably would have had more satisfying emotional beats. Trying to paper over Aiden’s antisocial personality disorder with a thin veneer of crime-fighting ultimately left me yelling complaints at the screen, particularly during the ending monologue.

I’ll go back to listening to”One Mic” now.

AJ Commentary

So there you have it. Not just one, but two votes for Aiden Pearce being the absolute worst. It’s gonna be tough to beat.

Also, Ryan informed me later, in the ending I didn’t watch yet, that the player gets the option of killing or not-killing one dude, in some kind of half-assed moral choice moment, after Pearce has already killed like a million guys already. Closure.

There is a hope I’m holding out here. Maybe I’m just not supposed to like Aiden. After all, the people he is supposedly protecting look on him with fear. The life he leads appears to be lonely and meaningless. He is obviously not a role model. At any rate, Ubioft is probably sick of people talking trash about their protagonists. They say in the future they promise to do better, so maybe the next Watch Dogs will have a stronger lead character instead of a bland hate machine.

It is now open season to discuss your least favorite video game protagonist.

About the author

Amanda Lange is a teacher, game designer, 3D artist, and technical evangelist. She likes RPGs, horror, action, fighting games, and anything pleasantly quirky. Also, she enjoys writing at great length about same, often posting articles to her personal blog at http://secondtruth.com. In the past, she has worked on educational titles, and taught game design and art in Detroit, MI. She is currently living in the Philadelphia PA area where she works with Microsoft.

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16 Responses to Aiden Pearce is the Worst

Synonamess Botch06/20/2014

Acid wash forever!

Fabian06/21/2014

Watch Dogs stole enough gameplay from other games for me to have fun with it, but it has some of the worst writing I’ve seen in years. Not only does Aiden have no redeeming qualities, none of the characters are written with any internal consistency (least of all Aiden). Most of my issues have been addressed in the article, so I’ll refrain from ranting about them here; I just wanted to express my agreement with everything that’s been said.

Agreed entirely. Aiden is 85% of why I stopped playing Watch Dogs. The other fifteen is because it was a rental. Truly loathed how the character and game design mandated murder. Even the “nonlethal” knockouts often provided “target killed” messages. I seriously don’t understand why dude couldn’t use tazers and pepper spray like a real vigilante. Loved how Kirk Hamilton summed it up by saying “Watch Dogs is not Gunpoint.” I’d add, “Watch Dogs wishes it was as good at camera-hacking-stealth as Republique.”

Marcus M.06/24/2014

Ubisoft doesn’t reveal most of his past, so what?! I wanted to know more too but you guys are acting like he’s the worst oh my gosh he sucks, well he doesn’t. Aiden is actually kinda cool, and his name is not douchey ._.

The name could be worse. Aiden is kind of, I dunno, trendy game protag name these days? My least favorite game protagonist NAME is Alex Mason.

I always say that and then it takes people a second. “Isn’t he the… no, wait… no…” Call of Duty.

“Mason” was OK in Silent Hill partially because it was a different time but mostly because Harry and Heather are more distinctive. Add “Alex” and it’s a bland wash, a combination of protags from other, better games. And I have nothing against the name Alex in the real world – it’s very versatile! But it feels like the safest possible choice for a video game character, for some reason. At least Aiden is a little fresh? (even if David Cage also used it.)

Aiden’s always struck me as sounding a little too unreal, so it usually rubs me the wrong way especially when applied to the usual “angry white guy” of AAA development. It didn’t bother me in Beyond since that Aiden was a ghost/poltergeist/thing, so an odd name seemed to fit.

Ubisoft’s naming conventions strike me as rather self-conscious of the setting of their game, which is in its way clever; I think back to the protagonists of the Assassin’s Creed series and find their names generally both good and memorable, if only because they don’t have head-bludgeoningly modern American type names. Ezio Auditorre. Edward Kenway. They fit with their period pieces and stand out from the crowd of AAA game protags while still (I think) sounding good.

It’s when they need to do a modern (or near-future) protagonist that they seem to have trouble, what with “Desmond Miles” and “Aiden Pearce”…like without the benefit of retrospect they don’t know WHAT a name today sounds like. I suppose some of this might still be attempting to stand out, to prevent the “What game was he in again?” sensation of the Alexes Mason, Mercer, and Kidd.

matt w06/25/2014

Ha ha Luigi is such a badass.

So as to the invitation in the last sentence of the original post, I was going to say Rameses Alexander Moran* is my least favorite game protagonist ever but that’s totally missing the point. Maybe it’s Gomez. Part of the reason I’m taking a possibly permanent break from Fez is that I can’t stand the stupid expression he gets on his face when he completes a cube, and the dialogue is pretty offensively mock-cutesy too.

As far as the name goes “Aiden” is boringly trendy. If Watch Dogs is set in the near future then “Aiden” is basically, well, “Matt.”

Anyway on that Profiler thing the dev really had some code written to reduce all the NPCs to one line, sometimes about their religion or ethnicity or sexual orientation, and then had the chutzpah to blame it on sick reality. Good Lord, man. Just own up to “I decided to include a hate crime simulator because I’m an asshole.”

*From Rameses, a text adventure that was truly innovative in having a dislikable protagonist who never did anything you tried to get him to do.

matt w06/25/2014

Hey I left a comment is it in spam limbo? No big deal it was not that great. Highlights: “Ha ha Luigi is such a badass.”
“If Watch Dogs is set in the near future then ‘Aiden’ is basically, well, ‘Matt.'”
Also a contribution to the “which PCs do you hate?” debate. I picked Gomez.

Something about that name has bothered me since I heard it too – it seems made-up. To all the actual Aiden Pearces of the world, I apologize. But your name seems made-up. As for the character himself, based on Ryan’s description he sounds delightful. An anti-social, murderous, crimefighting racketeer bent on revenge but unwilling to help figure out WHY the job that led to the death of his niece went bad? Sign me up! I simply can’t imagine why a hit man would target him. It’s inconceivable.

I’m holding off for a sale on this one, having enough games to play as it is, but that review helped me set my expectations for when I do play. Now I can enjoy it as a good game without any notions beyond that. Thanks, AJ and Ryan!

I have no problems saying that I think Aiden is a super douchey name. Aiden/Hayden/Jaden (and their various spellings) are the worst contemporary western names. This is of course excluding bizarre outliers like Helicopter Pilot and that football player, Ha Ha.

Sorry to all decent dudes with those names, it’s nothing personal.

Also: matt w, how can you hate adorable little Gomez? Shame on you! Do you also hate penguins and koalas and Super Meat boy?

I like penguins and koalas and am on record as wondering how, never having enjoyed anything by Edmund McMillen, I have still managed to own the rights to every game he’s ever made and a movie about awesome he is. And I don’t even buy that many games! I’ve never actually downloaded Super Meat Boy though, which is perverse because I like platformers.

Jesse B06/29/2014

I haven’t finished the game yet, but I’m working on it. So far I don’t hate the story as much as some reviewers, but I admit it does feel kind of taped-together-with-scotch tape. I do think it is a really fun game though. In a way it’s nice to have the plot not punish me for superimposing my own current personality/mood on a character (which I would do anyway) and just let me go at my own pacewithout any reprocussions.

I was however pretty irritated to find just another basic sandbox game after all the hype from a couple of years ago. I think maybe Ubisoft should wait to announce games until they actually figure out what features will be in the game. I can’t remember what the initial announcement said, but I remember my response was ” Holy Crap! They can do THAT in a GAME?!!” I was kind of expecting something a little more groundbreaking. I am happy that the game lets me go the stalth route however.

My biggest complaints are Aiden’s stupid looking outfit, and the name of the game its’ self. When I talk about the game with my friends I constantly get it mixed up with Sleeping Dogs (another stupid name by the way), and it makes the conversation much more difficult.

matt w06/30/2014

RECTIFICATION: In a thread I linked in my last post I attributed the characterization of LIMBO as “A boy[‘s] violent adventures” to Porpentine, but it was Merritt Kopas.

Parker Persinger03/19/2015

Aiden is a normal name, and its not that bad for him to siphon bank accounts, any other hacker would do so, at least he is not taking it all, if you do some math, you would see its about have of what they would be able to save, and killing lucky quine was the best thing to do, just like re-electing Obama was the wrong thing to do. And if preventing murder is wrong, then I don’t know what is right. Also the bit about the dialogue of the thug being bad, makes it realistic, if I were a fixer whimpering in fear, I’d ask stupid questions too. But the part where im stealing cars and yet people don’t call the cops is sad.